


Simplistic Duties

by Whitescruffydog



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asgardian!Selvig, Crack, Gen, too old for this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 03:51:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10235261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whitescruffydog/pseuds/Whitescruffydog
Summary: A telling of the MCU by an Asgardian disguised as a human who is way too old for this.Essentially, a crack theory that kinda smooths some problems over and makes countless more.





	

His job was simple, in theory.

As humanity evolved and learned science and mathematics and became more and more sophisticated, All-Father Odin had decided that for their own safety, it would be best if they faded into myth, and humanity never found out about the existence of aliens.

That was, in a nutshell, his job.  Currently going by Erik Selvig (actually Eirik Audunson), he literally made a living by exploring the world and being skeptical of things.

It was getting harder and harder with each iteration, as technology and recordkeeping advanced further and further, but Asgardians are nothing but stubborn and bull-headed, so he learned his share of deception.

His life was going well—established himself as a respected doctor in the field of astrophysics, keeping an eye on any theories and firmly stamping down on the dangerous ones.

Until Odin literally _threw his son out of the damn sky._

Erik thanked the Norns that he happened to be there when it happened, but damn it Odin you can't _do_ that to this planet anymore, they're too intelligent and it'll be all over the internet in a day—Darcy stop that!

What was he supposed to do?  Preferably, it would have been best to leave Thor to his ramblings, but he _was_ his prince, unfortunately.

“This is crazy,” he says, to everyone albeit for different reasons.  To convince Jane of the outrageousness of her (correct) belief, and to himself about the outrageousness of the situation.

But, alas, bless her beautiful soul, Jane was intelligent and _trusting_ and try as he may he couldn't dissuade her of the notion.

Thor (and many Asgardians) spoke the All-Tongue, the mythical language of Yggdrasil that allowed all to understand what was being spoken and for the speaker to understand all that he heard.

The problem with this particular spell was that one listener may hear him speak in English while another might hear Spanish, a conundrum that could only be solved by quickly explaining his language skills to one party, then distracting the other.

Luckily, the city must not have had many non-native speakers of English, because the oft practiced routine never came into usage.

By this point, however, news of the “satellite" had reached the wrong ears and the government had already stepped in.  He accidentally let his true opinion of the invasive bureaucrats slip, but he at least had experience in this lifetime to back it up.

His nerves were frayed—the last thing he needed was a whole government discovering their existence.  Or his centuries of identity fraud.

Maybe if they cooperated and quietly snuck away, they'd get bored of Mjolnir—no, Jane, why did you go _towards_ —oh for crying out loud! We _just_ agreed to not do this!

You want me to go _rescue_ him?  From the government agents?  When he said he was good at lying, he didn't mean this.  But did he really want the government imprisoning and torturing his prince?  Damn it.

He sincerely doubted the agents believed what he was saying, but what he _did_ know is that he needed a drink.

He, ah, may have drank a bit more that he should have, but not enough to say anything incriminating.  …He thinks.  Thor may have also been too drunk to realize it.  What _did_ they do?  It was fun.

Never mind that.  What was important was continuing to dissuade Jane from the “fairy tales" she was chasing.  Yes, yes, it's a nice idea, but not enough to get anywhere in the scientific community.  Unfortunately.  I'm sorry.

And then Lady Sif and the Warriors Three showed up.

_And then the Destroyer showed up._

Why.

And then Thor almost (actually?) died.

And was resurrected by Mjolnir.

And Erik was fairly certain that in Migardian terms, he was fired.

* * *

 

When Shield asked led him down into the dark depths of their base, Erik wasn’t joking when he said he thought they were going to kill him.  If they had figured out who he was or what he had been doing with his life, it wasn’t a stretch to say they would.  Humans tended to be volatile at best when threatened, but then, he supposed, so did most species. 

But honestly, Odin, why did you hide the tesseract on Midgard? 

Sure, she had the attitude of a 14-billion-year-old brat and was about as delightful as the Asgardian’s laundry room, but—okay, yes, point taken. 

Fine, let the finer lot of humanities morons annihilate themselves by trying to harness a spoiled space cube (two birds with one stone, as they say), but how did _he_ get sucked into it?

He didn’t want to deal with it—he didn’t want to help them study her, and yet, he said yes.  He swore it was because he wasn’t in a position to refuse, and yet…

A burning curiosity filled him—Asgardian or not he was a scientist at heart, and few beings got the chance to examine such a fascinating object, but the few things he did know about her made it very clear she was not to be tinkered with. 

As soon as he felt he was decently undocumented (there were cameras somewhere, he was sure, unfortunately) he gave her a few pats and urgently whispered, “ _Please_ don’t wake up.”

Thankfully, she was _always_ notoriously stubborn, even if her desire at the moment was simply to sleep, so Erik was fairly confident that she would peacefully snooze through anything Midgard threw at her.  _Fairly._   It was foolish to try to predict the actions of anything with the words “space” or “cube” in it, as dealing with Odin and a few woeful attempts at gambling had taught him. 

And then the ground shook with the distant awakening of a tesseract, and Erik wondered if his luck was this terrible in all universes. 

He really did not want to deal with it, but he had signed a contract.  Fury urgently demanded what it was doing ( _Space cube things, Fury, she’s doing space cube things)_ and Erik’s blunt lack of knowledge was unfortunately not an act. 

Then with a magnificent flare of tesseract energy, Loki appeared, and Erik was truly lacking speech.  For what possible reason… 

Thor, Erik had learned, was sent to Midgard as punishment.  From what Erik had caught during the final battle with the destroyer, Loki had been…less than good, so a similar punishment could have been levied, but he was clearly armed and with power …

Erik stood, awkwardly, defensively, watching the not-so-glorious man make a so-called glorious speech.

And then, Erik knew peace.

Of course, he didn’t like thinking of it as such, as it was truly torture when he was in his right mind, but peace was an oddly fitting word for it.  A brilliant haze of freedom guiding him through all the knowledge and information he could ever want—beautiful songs of the cosmic and bitter shrills of chaos and destruction closing in on the Nine Realms.

Erik did not go insane because he didn’t understand what he saw.

He went insane because he did. 

Asgardians were, in general, stronger than Midgardians, even one that spent countless years without honing the skills that were being chipped away by age, and this included mental strength.  But even they had a breaking point. 

His mind was filled with swirling blue-tinged visions of the six stones, the Mad Titan, where-are-my-pants, the convergence, torture, Thor’s banishment, too-much-coffee, Loki’s fall, the near genocide of Jotunheim—all pieces as fractured as his mind, falling, scattered across the cosmic coffee table in an ancient puzzle, unsolved, bitter, and terrifying. 

There was, sadly, an upper limit on how much knowledge a given being could comprehend without backlash. 

This did not surpass it.     

It took a far too much time, filled with some rather embarrassing things (he sincerely hoped Heimdall had not been watching.  To kill the god through secondhand embarrassment would be quite a feat.) but ultimately he recovered, in time to help save Midgard and Thor, and to bear witness to the ending of the Dark Elf invasion.

All it did was fill Erik with the cold sensation of drowning in that which he did not understand. 

The only feasible conclusion was that the _tesseract_ , the obnoxiously stubborn 14-billion-year-old brat, _was trying to warn him._

And if only one thing was certain in Erik’s mind, it was that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with what make a nigh-immortal space cube nervous. 

The tesseract, the mind stone, the aether—chaotic neutral, orderly good, chaotic evil—all appearing on Midgard within a few years. 

Erik was left with the distinct feeling the word “convergence” echoing so strongly in his mind had more than one implication. 

He was content to play it off as nothing, frightening hallucinations caused by frayed nerves and poisonous contact with infinity stones, but then Thor appeared on his doorstep—seeking the Norns.

The Infinite Six.  Convergence. Synergy.

Space, Mind, Reality, Time, Power, Soul.

They were never met to be together, and yet …

Erik didn’t even know who to pray to for help. 

**Author's Note:**

> This idea popped up and was mostly written at four a.m., so yes, crack of the purest quality. I figured I might as well finish and post it. 
> 
> There’s some other ideas in here that I didn’t explicitly mention, such as Erik’s relationship with Odin (he’s definitely respectful when needed, but otherwise it's just "Odin," sort of like Sif and the Warriors Three to Thor) and the nature of the tesseract (which is a recurring thing in my fics), but it's otherwise self-contained.


End file.
